Playback

 A pioneer of digital media and a profound influence on generations of artists worldwide, Steina returns to her roots with the first major retrospective of her work in Iceland.

 For over fifty years, Steina has created video, performance, and installation art through a creative embrace of electronic processing tools to explore what she calls “machine vision.” Born in Iceland in 1940, she grew up in Reykjavík and trained as a classical violinist. In 1969, Steina took up a Sony Portapak, an innovative portable video recording system, and began to experiment with the new medium of video. Steina: Playback traces the artist’s work from that moment onwards, highlighting the role of play and the place of sound in her innovative compositions. In the pathbreaking works that span her career, Steina tested the limits of human perspective and subjectivity. Her “duty,” as she put it, was “to show what cannot be seen except with the eye of media.”

 The earliest works on view were coauthored with Steina’s Czech-Icelandic life partner, Woody Vasulka (1937–2019), while the couple lived in New York City. The Vasulkas shared an obsession with the video’s signal and custom-designed hardware that could distort and manipulate it. Steina and Woody were also active figures in the avant-garde media arts community of Buffalo, New York, where they lived in the 1970s. In 1980, the Vasulkas moved to New Mexico, and Steina embraced the grand proportions of horizon, desert, and cosmos. Her video environments grew immersive, their scale mimicking the grandeur of the natural landscape [NB1] in both the Southwest and her native Iceland. In multimonitor and multichannel installations after the 1980s, Steina spatializes what the human eye cannot see.

 Playback attests to Steina’s fearless do-it-yourself approach to new media and her pioneering synthesis of the electronic and the natural, always emphasizing the importance of play. With her distinctive translation of musical modes into the visual realm and her desire to exceed human vision, Steina reveals an electronic sublime that attunes us to the vibrant, invisible energies inherent to both video and natural phenomena.

 Steina: Playback is organized by MIT List Visual Arts Center in collaboration with the Buffalo AKG Art Museum and curated by Natalie Bell, Curator, MIT List Visual Arts Center, and Helga Christoffersen, Curator-at-Large and Curator, Nordic Art and Culture Initiative, Buffalo AKG Art Museum. Coordinating curators are Markús Þór Andrésson, Director of the Reykjavík Art Museum, and Pari Stave, Head Curator for Exhibitions at the National Gallery of Iceland.

Steina (b. Steinunn Briem Bjarnadottir, 1940, Iceland; lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico) trained as a violinist in Reykjavík and Prague. She emigrated to the United States in 1965 with her life partner, Woody Vasulka. Initially working as a freelance musician in New York, she began to focus on video in 1970, and in 1971, cofounded The Electronic Kitchen (later The Kitchen), the legendary multidisciplinary avant-garde performance and experimental art space in New York City. After moving to Buffalo in 1973, Steina helped develop the production lab at the Center for Media Study, SUNY at Buffalo.  Since 1980, she has lived in Santa Fe, New Mexico, exhibiting regularly around the world. Her work is considered foundational in the history of video art.